His elbow slipped

I was inspired by the new levels of Wallyism we dug up yesterday so I thought I would dig up a little more.

Am I rubbing it in? Yes, I am. But when you look at the newly-dug levels, I think you will see why. I think nose-rubbing is just the right thing to do about this degree of mendacious bullying. I mean, in particular, the place where Wally is caught lying by one “Sean” and uses four sock puppets posting right on top of each other to bully Sean and then congratulate himself on the bullying. What could be more suitable than to make this contemptible behavior public?

It wasn’t about gnu atheists this time, December 2009; it was about climate change and denialism. It’s not a disagreement on the substance this time; it’s a disagreement on morality.

Wally as bilbo had said there were a lot of tobacco-deniers “here”; Sean had said who, where, show me; bilbo didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t; Sean pressed; bilbo wriggled; Sean pressed; bilbo coughed up one, without a link. Sean said link please; bilbo was silent; Sean said link please; bilbo was silent; Sean said you were noisy enough yesterday, how about it – and bilbo rose to his full height and let fly. bilbo let fly in a fashion that is all too familiar from our Wally-You’re Not Helping-bilbo-Tom Johnson (though kept under wraps by our friend Hammill).

…and Sean chooses the petty, desperate adult path. Or, should I say the Way of the Troll. Predictable. I wish I had bet money on it.

Why Sean, if it is this much of an issue to you (after now FOUR responses over two days with evidence on my part which you have made no concerted effort to disprove or even respond to outside of rote repetition), you are free to browse the blog archives yourself and find the quote(s) you are looking for. They are there for you, I promise. I will not argue with a brick wall who demands evidence but offers no retort when evidence is provided.

You have two choices: find the quote yourself (or some other form of evidence refuting my point since you were the one who challenged it, after all) or continue repeating yourself into troll obscurity. The choice is yours, but I have a feeling I already know which one you’ll pick.

Sean, bilbo is slapping you around this comment board like a little child. Man up!

Since making his original point, bilbo has posted multiple quotes from this very blog that support it. Yet you continue you scream “WRONG!!!!!” without backing yourself up with evidence of yor own. The burden of proof is on the accuser, and you’re screaming accusations like a child. If you’re not trolling like bilbo says, let’s see something to back your point up. Put up or shut up.

I’m also tickled pink that you don’t reference the 5 to 6 different commenters who came to my defence and provided clear evidence to your silly “quote fabrication” argument. The reason I didn’t respond this time is that you dredge up a months-old thread any time I threaten your weak brand of climate skepticism, and we’ve been over this on at least 4 different threads now, and you get smacked around by people other than me every time. You lost – get over it.

That got my attention because it seemed as if getting 3 or 4 puppets to gang up on Sean wasn’t enough; he had to make bilbo tell everyone on a different thread how many had done so (hey, and they couldn’t all have been sock-puppets, could they?). Then I saw that it must have been going on on several intermediate threads as well. I guess Sean was persistent. Good for him.

I think the big new lesson I’m learning from going over this stuff again after we know the background is what a completely hardened S.O.B. Wally Smith really is. We’re seeing how many times people nearly had him unmasked, tripped him up a bit and instead of him getting rattled by any of it and calling it a day before things got more out of hand, he pushed harder and harder. All this stuff is before he opened his own blog with a permanent floorshow. And by linking to Wally Smith at atagahi he was really flaunting it, daring the world to catch him by pointing very approvingly at his real self. That takes real… oh, I don’t know what it takes, but I’m glad I don’t have it. If I did, I’m sure I’d be alone with only my sock-puppets for company. If Wally is really part of a Christian community which influenced him, even indirectly, to do all this, maybe he is being embraced now for having lied so well for Christ…

“smacked around by people other than me ” – another lying classic. Way to go, Wally.

And, precisely. He’s hardened. He has been all along. He put on a nice apologetic act in his two emails to me last summer…and then I learned that he hadn’t wanted to apologize to me at all but was simply ordered to by people who had power over him. He’s hardened…and deeply, deeply nasty.

This is one of the things I resent about all the gnu-shunning, especially that outburst of it last week. The idea behind it is that we are exactly that nasty. The idea behind some of it is that I am that nasty. And you know what? I fucking am not. Not even close.

This is pretty interesting stuff, bilbo. I agree with Philip – I’d love to hear more from Chris and/or Sheril on this. Admissions that their own behavior is inappropriate and not useful is quite an example of a glarign double-standard, and a real one at that.

That in addition to the mistake of confusing bilbo’s and Philip Jr’s mother-in-law.

When’s Mooney going to give us a list of Wallly’s socks, which he could easily do?

Mooney knew, didn’t he?

How could he not?

How can you run a site that systematically attracts determined climate change denialists and other right-wing kooks, for years, and still not understand the very first thing about sock puppets, i.e., to check for identical IP’s to catch the common, really easy ones?

I don’t think you can. I’ll bet he was checking for socks all along, as part of his moderation strategy—catch the climate denialist socks and silently delete their comments.

I don’t think Mooney is that stupid. I don’ t think he’s nearly that stupid. I don’t think he’s stupid at all. I think he’s quite ruthlessly dishonest and trying to maintain is not-really-very plausible deniability.

I’m going to call it a day now, but before I do, I’ll just point you good people back to the last link I provided, for the surreal spectacle of Seminatrix explaining to bilbo what the “Tom Johnson” business was all about. I am not making this up.

And the mixup of Mr. Smith’s I referred to in #11 about the mother-in-law was pointed out to us by Stewart in #59 in the last thread about how Wally’s hand slipped. The number of times people called out Wally Smith for discrepancies between his sockpuppets at the Intersection (discrepancies that blatant sockpuppeting would very well explain) is astounding.

Of course, I wouldn’t doubt it if a certain so-and-so was smug enough to think that he or she can dismiss everything we are pointing out because for all he or she knows, I am just another sockpuppet of someone else here as could be most commenters and pseudonymous Internet bloggers. Who knows? Isn’t that the way Wally would have wanted it in the end?

Just read what you are talking about Stewart. Holy crap on a cracker. Maybe he’s hoping to sell the movie rights to Henry Selick (Coraline) or something. A whole film of stop-motion creepy sock puppets talking to each other about each other. Jeepers.

I’m not sure “hardened” is the right concept. Perhaps sociopathic would be more accurate–though diagnosis of sociopathy can be notoriously difficult. Anyway, sociopaths have no empathy or guilt. To need to be hardened one would have to have a need to harden ones feelings–to actually feel empathy or guilt. A sociopath doesn’t. So I’d say I think WHS is utterly indifferent to, or, even delighted with people’s impotent efforts to unmask him.

When’s Mooney going to give us a list of Wallly’s socks, which he could easily do?

What? That would require Mooney to accept some responsibility rather than his nonapology for being too *trusting*. (One of those framing tricks…Mooney wasn’t a gullible egotist guilty of self-serving, anecdote cherry picking confirmation bias–which would be bad–he was guilty of being too trusting, trust being a good thing that Mooney just has too much of. :-p )

Honestly the more I review all those old Intersection posts, the more I can’t believe that Chris/Sheril haven’t at least put some kind of disclaimer on all the Wally-infested bits. In some of these threads (global warming, Templeton, etc.) it seems Wally was responsible for something approaching 50% of the comments. Puerile content aside, the fact that he routinely shat up post after post a minimum of four chattering socks had a massive impact on the entire site. Whether they knew about it or not at the time, the jig is certainly up now. Do they really not care how bad this looks?

Another thing I’m recalling with these retreaded threads…more often than not, the only non-Wally anywhere near these conversations was…Tim Brod–er…”TB”. What’s his stake in all this, I wonder? Considering how (curiously, seemingly randomly) in on the YNH outing he was last summer, and now re-reading his contributions to Wally’s puppet theater, it’s hard for me to believe TB is just an innocent, like-minded bystander.

I think the best solution would be to go through all the posts and replace the name of wally’s sockpuppets. Something like “Bilbo (Wally sockpuppet)”, “Mllton (Wall sockpuppet)” and so on, just so people don’t have to keep track of it themselves.

it’s hard for me to believe TB is just an innocent, like-minded bystander.

TB was certainly not an innocent bystander. The goalpost shifting, name-calling and disingenuous behavior of TB is virtually indistinguishable from that of a Wally puppet. But there is something a lot more serious to be considered. TB, along with Jean Kazez was directly involved by Mooney who decided that they should be provided with the identity and location of Wally Smith. I am not sure exactly the time point that they were informed but certainly by last Summer they would have had the same information that we only recently had – information that allowed the simplest google search to demonstrate the Tom Johnson conservation meeting story as a complete lie. And what did they do? Not only did they fail to put the slightest effort into determining the veracity of the story but like Wally, they held out every inch of the way insisting that there was some basic underlying truth to the net of lies until every strand had been severed by Oedipus, Ophelia and the others on our side.

I am increasingly suspicious that the large majority of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s supportive comments come from sock puppets of some sort—if not Wally socks, then the socks of a few other people.

Some of them may be socks of bloggers who comment under a different name than they blog under. Up to a point, I think thats reasonable, and maybe the term “sock” isn’t quite right—it’s reasonable to go incognito sometimes, and I can easily see why M&K’s allies might not want to mix it up in the comments under their usual blogging names. It would make them targets of climate deniers and those nasty new atheists taking them to task for stuff they said on their own blogs, rather than their actual specific comments there.

If that’s true, then most of the non-Wally supportive comments may come not from random fans, but from supportive fellow bloggers posting pseudonymously—some subset of folks like Matt N., Josh R., Henry G., Jean K., some other climate and women-in-science bloggers, maybe M&K themselves… and a sock puppeting fan or two. If they revealed all the sock puppetry, even without saying whose the puppets were, it might show the Intersection to be a Potemkin Village… and if so, they probably wouldn’t want to head down that slope at all. They wouldn’t want to talk about it, e.g. discussing whether they’d revealed all of the sock puppetry, or explaining that they hadn’t exposed their incognito blogging allies, and how they draw the line between sock puppeting and acceptable pseudonymity. Best not to go there, and try to move on.

BTW, it’s not a secret that some science bloggers do sock puppet their own comment threads, or their allies’ comment threads, and there’s not a consensus that it’s an unacceptable practice.

I have the distinct impression that’s a fairly common practice among some of the more “strident” (note scare quotes) feminist bloggers over at ScienceBlogs, who tend to close ranks and get in-your-face with men they (often rightly and sometimes wrongly) perceive as obnoxious “mansplainers” barge in in and pontificate from a position of unreflective male privilege.

And up to a point, I think that may be a kinda reasonable thing to do. If you really are descended on regularly by bunches of obnoxious pontificating cranks of some sort, what are you going to do about it—let them take over your blog and drive away your actual fans who’d rather talk among themselves than explain and defend the same very basic and boring shit to annoying noobs over and over again? If the opposition outnumbers and out-posts the fans, you have to either ruthlessly moderate, to maintain even a semblance of balance, or fight back by whatever other means you’ve got. I can see why people would be tempted to sock puppet their own blogs, or at least have their blogging friends pitch in pseudonymously, to keep the outsiders from getting the upper hand and undermining the whole enterprise

Beyond a certain point, though, it’s something like a Potemkin Village—mostly a calculated sham meant to fool the people who are just passing through, or who never look too closely. And beyond a certain further point, it’s mostly a ruthless trap to unfairly gang up on the unwary folks who happen to sincerely disagree. (Even if the “gang” is really mostly one or two sock puppeteers; then it’s just a more personnel-efficient ruthless trap.)

I think that with Wally going full-bore for months and months, The Intersection clearly reached that point.

Thanks, Hertta, I was also thinking PJ must belong with the socks. When one skims through, so many strike one as “must-be”s one just can’t stop to note them all. Somewhere, I recall, there’s an Amy, who maybe appears only that once, who showed all the signs of being one.

BlackCat: We couldn’t alter what’s at the Intersection (and a good thing they haven’t done it yet – if they did, it would look like a complete admission of collusion), but maybe some kind of mirror permitting edits of identification could be housed somewhere. There must copyright issues of some kind involved, though whether the twins want copyright on that sewer is yet another question. Can you imagine looking at a sample comments thread, for example, where all confirmed “Wally”s were in one colour and all suspected “Wally”s in another? Wouldn’t be much plain black and white left, would there?

Sigmund, it was definitely in poor taste for M&K to entrust information only to their allies and not to the besmirched (it’s not nearly as bad as, but still makes me think of, the Vatican making sure its dirty child-rapist laundry stays within the church). I’m hardly uncritical of Jean in this, but to her “credit” (in the sense that we can all be “credited” with terrible things we haven’t done), she was at least not down among the socks acting for all the world as if she were one. Were it not for the fact that TB was known to be a real person, Tim Broderick, I doubt there’s a single one of us who would have hesitated to put him in the “definite” list of Wally socks.

Poor Wally, he just can’t see it. He’s as wrong about climate skeptics as he is about atheists. Seems all he knows is ‘argumentem tractum ex ano’ and ‘argumentem ad hominem’. He won’t have much of a scientific career if he doesn’t smarten up and change his modus operandi. Seems to me there are some very serious psychological problems at the root of all this hostility.

I’ve just added “Bill S.” and “PJ”. What is the consensus opinion on “EDK” and “The Accuser”? Also, during the recent You’re Not Helping Episode V: The Hammill Strikes Back incident, was Hammill his only identity, or did he use others?

BTW, it’s not a secret that some science bloggers do sock puppet their own comment threads, or their allies’ comment threads, and there’s not a consensus that it’s an unacceptable practice.

Of course that is unacceptable! How would that be any better than what Wally Smith did on YNH?

I have the distinct impression that’s a fairly common practice among some of the more “strident” (note scare quotes) feminist bloggers over at ScienceBlogs, who tend to close ranks and get in-your-face with men they (often rightly and sometimes wrongly) perceive as obnoxious “mansplainers” barge in in and pontificate from a position of unreflective male privilege.

I don’t know, but you are going to need more convincing evidence than your own impression to run with that one. I would doubt it otherwise.

And up to a point, I think that may be a kinda reasonable thing to do.

No it would not be reasonable. Just argue your position with your known handle or warn/ban the crank–that’s the reasonable thing to do.

I’ll have to look back at your two queries, hyperdeath, there’s just so much… Wally floating around (beginning to sound like something you might tread in) and I really want to find that Amy I mentioned earlier again. I think we may have missed many one-time appearances that we’ll never verify without M&K’s cooperation, which means we’ll never verify, as they really seem quite the opposite of motivated to get to the bottom of this and they’re not about to change tack just to prove me wrong.

I’m with Aratina. I really can’t conceive of a legitimate reason to sock up your own blog when you could just as easily reply to comments as yourself, moderate, and tell people who say things you don’t like to leave. (that’s me, getting shown the door at Zuska’s place for questioning the One True Feminism–a tangential fallout from the UA release)

Sigmund @ 25: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. TB has been deeply invested in the whole imbroglio since UA hit the streets. It’s just a bit weird and (seemingly) random. I get Jean’s involvement a bit more (though I definitely don’t get why her views and very behavior morphed to such an extent as the process unfolded). TB just came out of left field. And he’s a novelist, of course. According to one reviewer (Jon Jordan of Crimespree Magazine, no less), “[TB] has a unique ability to tell a story in a very whispered way”. I admit I don’t really know what that means, but it sounds quite impressive.

Paul at #13…I don’t know…I’ve been thinking at intervals “how could M and K not know?” but then immediately also thinking “well I don’t routinely look at IPs and I found out that recent sock was Signal and Grace only because I was idly curious.”

Then again, of course…I don’t get people like Our Wally, and I sure as hell don’t slice and dice all comments or ban everyone I faintly dislike the way M and K do.

Well. I wouldn’t want someone like Our Wally around even if it and all its socks endorsed every word I said – in fact all the more so in that case.

So…I don’t know.

Scote is probably right about “hardened” except that “hardened” doesn’t really mean “once was soft but now is hardened” – it means hard by nature. It’s sort of folk idiom for psychopathic.

sailor,

He won’t have much of a scientific career if he doesn’t smarten up and change his modus operandi.

He’s really not cut out for a scientific career, it seems to me. This kind of instinctive serial lying and fabulation to avoid just admitting “you’re right, I was exaggerating there, I take it back” is the very opposite of the scientific temperament. He lies the way other people breathe. He should go into marketing or PR or political handling. He’d make a fine Karl Rove.

Oh I don’t know sili, I’m sure there was a stampede of passionate fans there yesterday to congratulate Chris on winning an award for spiritual journalism for his article in Playboy. (No, I’m not making that up.)

There is a firefox (and other browser) extension called greasemonkey that lets you change how web pages are displayed in your web browser. If there was a list of pages known and suspected wally sockpuppets and a list of websites they appeared on it would be possible to make a script to change the colors or add text wherever the names appeared.

Well, nobody, of course, but Wally seemed to think it was typical underground Gnu Atheist jargon and brought it in for that extra touch of authenticity (if I don’t actually wet myself typing this).

Yes, poor Wally doesn’t do a very credible “New Atheist” and certainly can’t do a very good “child”, but he does a decent “atheist scientist concerned about how science is presented to the public” and a brilliant “troll who’s obsessed about certain bloggers”.

I basically agree that sock puppeting your own blog is wrong, but I think there are some funny gray areas.

For example, I don’t think it’s quite as bad if you have one identity that you post under, and one different identity that you sometimes comment under, subject to certain restrictions. (E.g., if you lose an argument in the comment thread, you don’t get to pretend your argument is still valid and say it again in another blog post, and you don’t get to comment as the blogger and as someone else in the thread to give the impression that there are more people actively commenting on “your side” than there are.)

Even with those restrictions—which is a different situation from the kind of tag-team wall-of-noise shit Wally Smith constantly did—-it still doesn’t seem right to me, and you’re right that it’s better to ban the cranks, but I can at least understand the temptation.

Basically, you’re right, and I shouldn’t have said anything about it without thinking about it more, and expressing myself better. I agree that sock-puppeting your own blog is generally bad, although I think there are bad situations where the practical alternatives aren’t as much better as I’d like. (E.g., ruthlessly moderating out disagreeing comments, not because they’re exactly cranky, but just because they’re too redundant—as newspapers editors have to do with letters to the editor. That’s terribly prone to abuse, too, because it tends to give a false impression in several ways—even if you admit to doing it, its not generally clear how much you’re doing it, or whether you’re really just reducing redundancy vs. censoring dissenting views—and there’s no line between those two in practice; they overlap. I do think bloggers have a right to do that sort of thing, if they’re above board about it, but its ugly and intrinsically iffy.)

I think about these things and have a certain sympathy for desperate measures, because I once had a blog for a few weeks and was overwhelmed by commenters who disagreed with me—Christians, conservatives, and libertarians mostly—and I didn’t have the time and energy to respond to all of them myself. Since I didn’t have an established base of people who agreed with me, I was in a bad position. I didn’t think that most of the comments were very malicious, or that the people making them were complete idiots or total cranks. They mostly just disagreed, mostly out of what I thought involved some stupidity and considerable ignorance, and there were just too many of them.

So rather than doing any of the above things, none of which I like, I just said “fuck it” and deleted the blog. I wanted to be completely above-board and completely even-handed, but I didn’t want to be a whipping boy for a mostly sincere but rather clueless mob.

Or so it seemed. Maybe it was just Wally, come to think of it. :-) I couldn’t see the IPs, so maybe the actual problem was that I was mostly getting sock puppeted.

If I’d thought my blog was Really Important, I would have been tempted to take somewhat desperate measures for a while, until I established a reader base that could and would defend my general POV—as PZ’s and Ophelia’s fans do, so that they don’t have to rebut every disagreement themselves.

I didn’t think my blog was Really Important, and wasn’t sure that would ever happen, didn’t want to go down that slippery slope and get stuck running things in an icky iffy way, so I just bailed out.

—

As for what makes me think there are actually science bloggers who do sock puppet their own and each others’ blogs, Greg Laden and others have said so. (And IIRC he’s made it pretty clear Dr. Isis is one of the ones who sock puppets her own blog.) I assume Greg knows what he’s talking about, and I get the impression there’s been backchannel discussion about that at SB, and considerable disagreement about what the bounds of acceptable behavior are, with the resulting rule that everybody runs their own blogs as they see fit. Some people sock puppet their own blogs or the blogs of friends who like that, and others make it clear that won’t be tolerated on their blogs.

(I may be mistaken about people sock puppeting each others’ blogs, but IIRC correctly Greg has made it clear that some people at least sock puppet their own—and my impression is that nobody’s rebutted that charge. I could be wrong about that. If it is true, I’d be surprised if some of those people didn’t post on each others’ blogs pseudonymously, which seems like a a lesser offense if you stick to a single pseudonym on any given blog, and don’t do really tacky shit like cheering yourself on, giving a false impression of a consensus, etc.)

Also, during the recent You’re Not Helping Episode V: The Hammill Strikes Back incident, was Hammill his only identity, or did he use others?

Well I can’t be sure, of course, but I think it’s most unlikely that he used others, at least on the Hammill scheme itself. The whole point was to build up a picture of Hammill as Totally Adult and Reasonable and then use that to sow little bits of poison. The whole point was to sucker reasonable people into discussing with him, as he did.

Could there be others out there? Sure. I don’t think there are any suspiciously eager Hammill-echoes though. He had managed to figure out that that tends to trigger alarms. Duh.

If I recall correctly you said that you identified him, at least in part, by ip address. Would it be possible to screen for suspicious ip addresses and send you a notification if one shows up? I am not talking about an ip ban, just a notification.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s vastly better to explicitly tell someone to leave than to silently moderate them out—at least people know who’s being censoring—and silently moderating them out is much better than countering them with a sock.

I’d certainly be happier if it was a universal norm that nobody sock puppeted their own blog, even as a single “incognito” sock.

I’m a little less clear on what I think about going incognito with a single identity different from your blogging identity, on somebody else’s blog.

I think it’s wrong if you’re pushing the same controversial POV you push on your own blog, and that’s a subject of discussion where you’re commenting. For example, it would be wrong for PZ to show up at The Intersection to defend gnu atheism and not acknowledge that it was PZ himself, basically defending himself among others.

On the other hand, if he just wanted to clarify a point of genetics that somebody was getting wrong, and didn’t want to draw shitloads of anti-gnu vitriol from assholes like Wally, I could understand it. But maybe it would be better to just not comment in that case. I don’t know.

until I established a reader base that could and would defend my general POV—as PZ’s and Ophelia’s fans do, so that they don’t have to rebut every disagreement themselves.

Right; now this raises a really interesting point. I’ve been very firmly and energetically told that I’m a bully, and that one reason I “get away with it” is that I have a reader base.

There’s something to that.

I think about it a good deal, for a lot of reasons – resentment, of course, for one, but also because it’s interesting, and because it’s not completely false. If I didn’t have a reader base…I might just not bother, or stop bothering after awhile, or something along those lines. It is true that knowing that I’m talking to at least a few people makes it…I don’t know, non-futile to go on talking.

And it is possible for me to use that to bully people. That is something it’s worth thinking about. It’s also worth trying to be careful about it.

I’m using it to bully Wally right now. That’s why I mentioned rubbing his nose in it yesterday, and explained why I think it’s an appropriate response to what he got up to. But that is what I’m doing.

Wally wanted to be able to do the same thing, so he took a shortcut, or rather hundreds of them. He wanted to make an Instant Pharyngula.

But…there’s also a built-in filter here. There’s a limit to the kind of bullying I can do, and that’s fine with me – I’ve groomed the place that way. You guys are Quality Commenters; you argue; you don’t just shout at people.

But they’re not confirmed socks. Any list should separate confirmed from unconfirmed.

Which are the confirmed socks? In this comment he admits to being “Milton C.”, “Seminatrix”, “Bilbo”, “Patricia”, “Polly-O!” and “You’re Not Helping” (and uses the name “William”). In a later comment he further admits to being “Petra”, “Philip Jr.” and “Tom Johnson”. In the same thread, “Brandon” is implicated by IP address. Am I missing any?

In the same thread, I see the names “Jacque” and “Olaf Olaffsson” suggested. Are these sockpuppets, or unconnected bystanders?

For those who have given up on the Intersection:Chris Mooney has just won an award from the ‘religion communicators council’ given to, wait for it, “individuals in secular media who communicate religious issues, values and themes with the utmost professionalism, fairness and honesty.”

Now stop laughing.

The award was for his article in Playboy where he redefined ‘spirituality’ so that he could tell the religious that scientists were ‘spiritual’ too.

I was the first commenter – quoted the last three words of the above quote and asked if the rcc knew about Wally Smith. It wasn’t posted…

(Ophelia, after what Wally did to you, this isn’t bullying, it’s his comeuppance.)

Paul at #13…I don’t know…I’ve been thinking at intervals “how could M and K not know?” but then immediately also thinking “well I don’t routinely look at IPs and I found out that recent sock was Signal and Grace only because I was idly curious.”

Then again, of course…I don’t get people like Our Wally, and I sure as hell don’t slice and dice all comments or ban everyone I faintly dislike the way M and K do.

You also don’t blog about anthropogenic global warming and Republicans fucking us all over for years on end, making yourself a target of a whole bunch of determined climate change deniers and conservative zealots.

I find it difficult to imagine that Mooney could run a argely climate blog with a frequent anti-Republican theme and not eventually clue in to the sock puppet problem—he obviously does get floods of denialist posts, and plenty of conservatives dissing liberals and so on. I strongly suspect sock puppeting by AGW deniers is a regular topic of conversation in climate blogging circles, and would be amazed if he’d never heard of checking IPs for socks when you get a flood of dissent, and why that’s a good and easy thing to do.

Also keep in mind that Mooney is a very consciously political guy, who prides himself on being extraordinarily savvy about the evolution of media, including problems like fragmentation of media and “echo chambers” on the internet, specifically including criticizing blogs that he uses as examples of echo chambers, and problems with pseudoymity and civility.

Seriously, how can he not be aware of astroturfing, etc., and see that the similar things would naturally happen to him, and specifically that he’s a very likely target of sock puppets when blogging as he does on the internet?

If he really never saw that coming, after years of climate and media blogging, with people in his comment threads regularly accusing other people of sock puppeting, and his constant pontificating about those nasty other blogs with their irresponsible pseudonymous commenting machines, and casting anybody who disagrees as unforgivably naive…

Seriously, how can he not be aware of astroturfing, etc., and see that the similar things would naturally happen to him, and specifically that he’s a very likely target of sock puppets when blogging as he does on the internet?

To put it bluntly, he’s incompetent (or at least vastly out of his depth). I know little about journalism, but at least I’m aware of two vitally important facts: The first is “always check your sources”. The second is “I know little about journalism”.

The first fact is common knowledge, and disregarding it is the journalistic equivalent of a surgeon leaving instruments inside the patient, or a pilot forgetting to extend his undercarriage before landing. (Again, I know little about surgery or flying, but it would be perfectly reasonable to make a judgement of incompetence in such cases.)

The second fact is where Mooney really falls down. He regards himself as a savvy journalist, when in fact he’s a gullible idiot. He regards himself as an expert on communication, when in fact he’s a tactless fool, who routinely aggravates and patronises the very people he’s trying to convince. He regards himself as a promoter of honesty and civility, when in fact he’s an obnoxious, deceitful hypocrite. I’m not an expert, and neither is he, but at least I know that I’m not an expert. If Mooney knew as much about journalism as I do, then he wouldn’t have gotten into this mess.

TheBlackCat March 12, 2011 at 9:43 amThere is a firefox (and other browser) extension called greasemonkey that lets you change how web pages are displayed in your web browser. If there was a list of pages known and suspected wally sockpuppets and a list of websites they appeared on it would be possible to make a script to change the colors or add text wherever the names appeared.

Ooooooh. I was wondering about that the other day.

It’d be lovely to have.

Oh I don’t know sili, I’m sure there was a stampede of passionate fans there yesterday to congratulate Chris on winning an award for spiritual journalism for his article in Playboy. (No, I’m not making that up.)

I see that these days a stampede comprises three people (and your trackback).

course, I wouldn’t doubt it if a certain so-and-so was smug enough to think that he or she can dismiss everything we are pointing out because for all he or she knows, I am just another sockpuppet of someone else here as could be most commenters and pseudonymous Internet bloggers. Who knows? Isn’t that the way Wally would have wanted it in the end?

Paul W. I think there is a problem of what people mean when they use the term “sock puppet.”

I think the term should be used to refer to a fake identity one uses to talk to or against oneself to produce some self-serving effect. This would include, I suppose, a fake identity on one’s own blog that bolsters (or straw mans) your arguments with other (real) commenters.

This is distinct from a pseudo identity. I have used pseudo id’s in commenting where I wanted to protect my identity, for perfectly valid reasons. Since I already have an identity which is not pseduo, this is sometimes called sock puppeting, but that is not at all what it involved. (I don’t give up my right to comment with a pseudonym just because I don’t in the main use one.)

Regarding the scenario of discussion among science bloggers, etc. and the back channel: If that particular conversation happened as you suggest it did not involve me. As far as I know the bog-by-blog independence and lack of cros-blog rule making at Sb was part of Sb from way before I got there. It may well have emerged from that kind of conversation, though. Makes sense.

Does anyone have any further information? Are any of them proven to be Wally? Are any likely to be innocent bystanders?

As I mentioned in a previous thread, I believe Oedipus, of “The Buddha is Not Serious” fame (and the extremely unwieldy comment thread on same), posted something on The Big Thread that looked to me like evidence that “whs” (not, I think, capitalized) is not only Wally but a key line of evidence that Wally is “Tom Johnson.”

“WHS,” not incidentally, is also probably the dumbest name Wally came up with for a sock.

Rieux, I’ve seen that thread, thanks. However, most of the evidence for WHS seems to be based on probabilities, rather than something hard like an IP-address match. Is there anything to justify listing him under “proven” rather than “suspected”?

I appreciate this thread for the modeling of dynamics, or the historical analysis (more than the comeuppance to Wally Smith, although the comeuppance was earned with much effort). The Intersection as a Potemkin village is a good image to take away. My two cents:

Unscientific America is dated July 14, 2009 at Amazon. Has all of Wally’s known puppetry appeared after that date? And as matters of fact (which we may never know) — did Wally read it — and when — and was the book Wally’s introduction to the name of Chris Mooney — and did Wally find the Intersection through the book and Chris Mooney’s name?

I suspect “yes” for all these questions, but I haven’t followed the story as closely as others here.

Dave, yes, I think so – in fact Mooney and Kirshenbaum did a post “setting the record straight” about me when Wally unmasked, making a big fuss over the fact that I’d said bilbo had called me a liar just before M&K banned me in July 2009 when in fact bilbo and Tom Johnson (both Wally) hadn’t started commenting until October that year. I’d conflated bilbo with TB/Tim Broderick; it was TB who called me a liar in July 2009. M and K didn’t mention that part though. They closed comments on that post, too. :- )

In spite of what I said in the post, this isn’t just for the sake of rubbing Wally’s nose in it, it’s more for the sake of the record. If I had the patience I’d go through everything for the sake of the record, but I don’t. But this is one piece of it.

Wally edited a comment by “whs” to remove an adverb and change “forgive me” to “sorry.” I don’t know any bloggers who would bother making such edits for comments not their own.

In that same comment of mine, I point out that a comment written by Milton C. had changed authorship after five weeks to Michael L. Thomas. Why would a blogger do that if both names weren’t under his control?

So I would include both whs and Michael L. Thomas as confirmed socks of Wally.

Wally wrote about the outreach event in early May 2009, during which he complained about posts on Jerry Coyne’s WEIT site. One can probably safely say that he would have been aware of the accomodationist dispute at that time and perhaps commenting on it – although with what name or in what venue I don’t know.

If there is any doubt that whs is Walter Hammond Smith, just read the three posts below along with the comment thread at YNH. When the data from these posts are combined, they point directly to Wally. whs could be called Wally’s only non-sock. It is Wally claiming to be Wally; he says he is a grad student at UA and he discusses his outreach experiences through the Episcopalian organization Camp McDowell.

Indeed I am surprised no conspiracy theories have been circulating about why Mooney specifically mentioned “a Baptist group and an Episcopalian organization,” since that effectively outed Wally at the time. Dave’s accidental discovery of the whs comment being modified is the clincher.

There is a Wally Gap between May 2009 and October 2009. That was a very busy period for the Great Accommodationism Dispute. What can he have been doing with all that simmering fury for five or six months?

I think I basically agree that a pseudo identity, used reasonably, is different from what we generally mean by “sock puppeting.” Thats why I tried to contrast simply going “incognito” with the kind of ganging up and quite reverberant shit Wally constantly did.

And I suppose that up to a point, it’s even okay to go incognito to defend yourself. It’s more important that people be able to speak freely—think of the pamphleting in the run up to the American Revolution—than small effects of implying a broader consensus than actually exists.

So think of the example I gave before, of PZ (hypothetically) showing up to pseudonymously defend New Atheism at The Intersection. I think that would be a little bit uncool, in that it falsely implies that PZ has one more fan than he actually does. But so what? Everybody knows PZ has lots of fans anyhow, and one more doesn’t matter much. What matters more is what he actually says, not who says it, or exactly how many people say it. I think it’s positively classy of PZ to show up as PZ when he does show up, but not morally obligatory, or even close. I have a preference for PZ showing up as PZ but nothing like a right to it; if he showed up pseudonymously to avoid a frenzy of PZ-hate, that would be justified, as long as he didn’t show up as multiple PZ defenders.

Similarly, if various SBers show up pseudonymously on each other’s blogs, I think that up to a point that has to be okay. Bloggers are public figures, and it’s reasonable for public figures to go incognito to avoid the weird shit that happens to public figures. (Just it’s reasonable for less public figures not to advertise everything about themselves that might be of interest to random observers. E.g., if I admit to an alternative lifestyle on my blog, I’m no more obligated to show up as somebody identifiably living that alternative lifestyle on YOUR blog than I am to tell everybody at work or everybody in line at the grocery store what I do in private.)

My subjective impression is that some of the pseudonymous posting by some SB bloggers goes a little further than that—trying to give an impression that a blogger has more regular reader/commenters than they actually do, and with some people using multiple identities to suggest broader support and a more general consensus than there actually is. I think. I can’t prove it, though, and I could be wrong; sometimes multiple real people tag-teaming somebody looks very much like a sockfest.

The phrase, “Don’t be a Wally” is common in British English, the word ‘wally’ referring to ‘a silly or inept person.’ Whilst the etymology is uncertain, I look forward to the day when the OED includes

“Don’t be a wally”: [Atheism: derogatory reply] Named after Walter H Smith. A curt reply used online when a commenter presents a particularly egregious accommodationist argument that science and religion are compatible, or simply tells outspoken atheists to STFU.

I’m guessing the OED would find a more nuanced expression than STFU, though.

On my own blog I once had an alter-ego “sock” (waay back in the day) that I used to argue, essentially, the diametrically opposite positions of mine. The goal was to, one, stir up my few readers and get them to argue a bit; and two, troll right-wing blogs into linking to my outrageous posts approvingly. I gave up after some B- or C-lister linked to an over-the-top post where “my token conservative friend and co-blogger” argued that liberals should be systematically murdered. Poe’s Law strikes again!

I’ve considered doing it again, maybe on a separate blog, but I don’t know if I have the stomach for it (plus I barely post on my actual blog as it is).

There is a Wally Gap between May 2009 and October 2009. That was a very busy period for the Great Accommodationism Dispute. What can he have been doing with all that simmering fury for five or six months?

A new mystery.

The Gainesville Times says he got married in June 2009. Maybe that partly explains his consipicuous absence between May and October?

(Also: am I the only one who finds it a little ironic that he married a journalist/reporter?)

Will somebody, SMBC maybe, do a cartoon about her asking him what computer work is so important he never comes to bed? Did she know? Could he have tried to enlist her to add real variety? Actually, the questions already make me a bit sick without knowing the answers.

Also, am I right in thinking that Wally is pursuing a scorched-earth policy on his real-life web presence? His onearth.org articles are missing. His university website is gone. His WordPress blog has gone private.

does anyone have suggestions as to other blogs known to be haunts of Wally that I might check in the same fashion? Or has the only truly new name been Hammill? (Did Hammill ever even show up at M&K’s place?)

does anyone have suggestions as to other blogs known to be haunts of Wally that I might check in the same fashion?

He certainly visited Josh Rosenau’s blog, Thoughts (on why I hate Jerry Coyne) From Kansas. He has also quoted things said on Jason Rosenhous’s EvolutionBlog, both of these being part of the scienceblogs network.

I think he seemed to be particularly drawn to the accomodationist debate postings rather than any others so on The Intersocksion, Evolutionblog and TFK it might be easier to concentrate on those particular posts.

Good ideas, but I don’t think I’ll be siccing my blog-downloading web-bot on ScienceBlogs until well after someone sounds the all-clear from their current DDoS attacks, even though its written to not be too much of a pig about bandwidth. I don’t want to be a part of that problem.

At any rate: I know that as Hammill he posted at Talking Philosophy (on Ben Nelson’s post The Unquiet Scientist), Rosenau’s, Rob Knop’s, BioLogos, Chris Stedman’s (on Andrew Lovley’s guest post). That doesn’t always reflect an existing pattern though – he posted on the last three right after either I or Jerry Coyne had done a post about them. In other words I think he went there because he saw posts that pointed him there, not because he was already a regular. That could apply to the first two as well – it could apply to all of them. He hates the Coyne-Benson cabal really a lot.

I’ve still got my archive of the Intersocktion from July 10, 2010, and could easily just add a few names to the list being searched for and just see how much the percentages change. Or, I could download all their posts since then and run a more-complete search (I could make a graph of comments over time if I did that, and we could all chuckle at the steep drop-off).

With other blogs, I’d only run an archive if there were good suspicion that Wally was pulling his multiple-sock stunts, either recently or in the long-ago, with names already known. The interesting thing about what I did (I humbly say) is that it measured the sheer volume of the sockpuppeting, in easy-to-grasp percentages. Doing the same thing to one-off comments of Wally’s won’t tell us anything new in that regard.